CA Board of Education sued over exit exam

From the LA Times website:

A group of high school students and their parents filed a class-action lawsuit today against the State Board of Education on behalf of the tens of thousands of California students who have failed the exit exam required to graduate.

The suit seeks a court order allowing students in this year’s graduating class to earn their diploma regardless of whether they passed the math and English portions of the exam. Lawyers for the students plan to argue that underfunded schools have failed to adequately prepare minority and disadvantaged students for the exam and that the state board did not consider alternatives to the test, as required by law.

Jury Awards $172M to CA Wal-Mart Employees

Breaking news from the Associated Press:

OAKLAND, Calif. - A California jury on Thursday awarded $172 million to thousands of employees at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. who claimed they were illegally denied lunch breaks.

The world’s largest retailer was ordered to pay $57 million in general damages and $115 million in punitive damages to about 116,000 current and former California employees for violating a 2001 state law that requires employers to give 30-minute, unpaid lunch breaks to employees who work at least six hours.

The damages were originally tallied as $207 million after a court clerk misread the punitive damages as $150 million. The amount of punitive damages was later clarified.

The class-action lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court is one of about 40 nationwide alleging workplace violations by Wal-Mart, and the first to go to trial. The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer, which earned $10 billion last year, settled a similar lawsuit in Colorado for $50 million.

In the California lunch-break suit, Wal-Mart claimed that workers did not demand penalty wages on a timely basis. Under the law, the company must pay workers a full hour’s wages for every missed lunch.

The company also said it paid some employees their penalty pay and, in 2003, most workers agreed to waive their meal periods as the law allows.

The lawsuit covers former and current employees in California from 2001 to 2005. The workers claimed they were owed more than $66 million plus interest, and sought damages to punish the company for alleged wrongdoing.

[…]

The lawsuit was filed by several former Wal-Mart employees in the San Francisco Bay area in 2001, but it took four years of legal wrangling to get to trial.

College fees in California challenged

“A group of out-of-state college students filed a class-action lawsuit Wednesday challenging a law that lets some illegal immigrants who graduate from California high schools pay lower in-state fees at the state’s public colleges and universities.”

The 2002 law allows students who attend at least three years of high school in California to qualify for the same in-state fee break given California citizens, regardless of their immigration status.

The lower fee levels can save students thousands of dollars a year. For example, out-of-state students pay nearly $24,000 a year to attend the University of California, about $17,000 more than California residents.

The lawsuit was filed in Yolo County on behalf of 42 plaintiffs, including two children of a former San Diego congressman. Nine UC Davis students make up the largest plaintiff group from one campus.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said the discriminatory policy affects 60,000 out-of-state students who pay higher fees than in-state illegal immigrants. The plaintiffs are seeking damages.

“The class becomes bigger each year because each year thousands of law-abiding freshmen enter our system,” said Redwood City attorney Michael Brady.

At issue is a federal law the plaintiffs claim specifically bars states from offering benefits to illegal immigrants without also making them available to U.S. citizens.

California is one of nine states with laws allowing undocumented students to qualify for lower in-state tuition rates. A lawsuit filed in federal court in Kansas challenging that state’s law was dismissed, but is being appealed.

[…]

To qualify for the in-state rate, students must have attended a California high school for at least three years, must graduate from a California high school and must sign an affidavit declaring they will seek to become legal residents as soon as it is feasible.

Suzanne Kattija-Ari, 23, a UC Davis veterinary student from Hawaii whose father immigrated from Thailand in the 1970s, said the fee break is unfair to those who follow the law but end up paying more than their illegal counterparts.

She said she has had to work several part-time jobs and take out student loans to pay her high out-of-state fees.

“It’s not so much that they got this benefit and we didn’t; it’s just the unfairness of it,” she said. “They’re 18 now. They should do the right thing, apply for citizenship.”

Best Buy class action might be coming soon

AP is reporting that Best Buy is now facing allegations of employment discrimination.

SAN FRANCISCO - Six former and current employees of Best Buy Co. Inc. have sued the electronics retailer, alleging the company has purposefully excluded women and minorities from top-paying jobs as part of a sales culture catering to white men.

The civil complaint, filed in a San Francisco federal court Thursday, seeks to be certified as a class action so it can potentially represent thousands of women, blacks and Hispanics who work in Best Buy’s 731 stores nationwide. The Minneapolis-based company currently employs about 114,000 workers.

The lawyers who filed the suit also hope to represent women and minorities who applied for jobs at Best Buy, but were never hired. The complaint alleges Best Buy’s managers routinely ignore applications from people “who do not conform to the (company’s) young, white, male culture.”

[…]

Expanding Thursday’s lawsuit into a class action won’t be a simple task.

It took three years and more than 1 million pages of evidence before a similar lawsuit alleging sexual discrimination against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. was certified as a class action in June 2004. Wal Mart, the world’s largest company, is still appealing that suit’s class-action status.

The Wal-Mart suit has emboldened class-action lawyers to target other large employers, said Jeff Tanenbaum, a San Francisco attorney specializing in labor law.

Case on inmate’s abortion certified as a class action

The latest on inmate abortions in Missouri:

KANSAS CITY (AP) - More than five weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court said Missouri had to let a pregnant inmate have an abortion, the question of whether other state prisoners can get abortions on demand is far from settled.

U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple this week certified the woman’s case against the Department of Corrections as a class action lawsuit, saying she will represent all current and future Missouri inmates wanting abortions in seeking to overturn a state policy against helping prisoners get the procedure.

In his order, filed in Kansas City on Monday, Whipple said three more inmates have requested abortions since his initial ruling in October.

Republican Gov. Matt Blunt appealed Whipple’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to intervene.

Attorneys for the inmate, referred to in court documents only as Jane Roe, didn’t immediately return phone calls for comment yesterday.

At issue was the state’s abandonment this summer of a long-standing policy of providing transportation and guards for inmates wanting abortions, leaving an exception only if a woman’s life or health is endangered. The state cited costs and security concerns.

Roe, serving a four-year sentence, said she discovered she was pregnant not long after being arrested during the summer for probation violations in California. She challenged the Missouri Department of Corrections’ policy, arguing it was an unconstitutional violation of her right to an abortion.

Florida families suing over Medicaid

Mark Hollis of the Orlando Sentinel reports that families in Florida are suing over Medicaid:

Five Florida families filed a lawsuit in federal court in Miami on Monday demanding reform of the state’s Medicaid system and alleging that thousands of poor and disabled children aren’t getting the preventive health-care services to which they’re entitled.

The families joined the Florida Pediatric Society and the Academy of Pediatric Dentistry in a class-action lawsuit against Gov. Jeb Bush’s top three state health officials — the heads of the state Agency for Health Care Administration, the Department of Children & Family Services and the Department of Health.

The lawsuit, modeled after a similar case in Oklahoma, contends that the state Medicaid program is violating federal law by operating a bureaucratically cumbersome health system for the poor that sets physicians’ reimbursement rates too low to keep enough number of doctors and dentists in the program.

[…]

According to the lawsuit, state health reports found that in the budget year ending in fall 2004, more than 500,000 Medicaid-enrolled Florida children were furnished no preventive health-care services. Among children not getting medical checkups that year, the lawsuit claims, were more than 30,000 children under 12 months, more than 152,000 between ages 1 to 5, and more than 337,000 ages 6 to 18.

Judge OKs class action suit against tech school

David Wickert of The News Tribune is reporting that a judge in Pierce County, Washington has “cleared the way for a class action lawsuit against a for-profit career school that closed last March amid allegations it preyed on low-income students.”

Friday’s ruling means thousands of former students of the Gig Harbor-based Business Computer Training Institute potentially could enter the lawsuit.

Already nearly 50 former students have joined, claiming they were misled about the quality of the education BCTI provided and their prospects for a job after graduation. Many were recruited outside welfare or unemployment offices and claim they were promised good-paying technology jobs if they completed BCTI programs.

Those programs, which taught basic word processing, spreadsheets and other computer skills, cost about $11,000 for a 30-week program. Many students used taxpayer-backed loans to pay for their education. But some claim their BCTI education didn’t prepare them for even basic office work, leaving them with few employment prospects but thousands of dollars in debt.

[…]

BCTI closed its seven campuses in Washington and Oregon on March 14 amid state investigations in Washington and Oregon. A Washington investigation found evidence that falsified admissions tests allowed unqualified students to get financial aid.

A broader Oregon investigation concluded that BCTI misled students, enrolled students who couldn’t benefit from its programs and reported inaccurate graduation and job-placement statistics to the state.

ACLU files class action over right of parolees to vote

The Colorado constitution bars prisoners from voting while they’re in prison… but only while they’re in prison. So why does a state law keep those on parole from voting as well?

DENVER — The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit Thursday challenging a state law barring thousands of people on parole from voting or registering to vote.

Norman Mueller, a volunteer attorney, said the statute violates the state constitution, which he said bars prisoners from voting only if they are in prison.

“The Colorado Supreme Court has said in several cases that when prisoners are released on parole, they have completed their term of imprisonment,” Mueller said.

The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of an estimated 6,000 people in Colorado who are on parole.

Under Colorado law, felons are allowed to vote only if they are no longer in prison and are not on parole. Last year, Secretary of State Donetta Davidson discovered 6,352 possible voter registration matches for felons, and county clerks were ordered to check the rolls for felons and flag them for poll judges.

Mueller said nationwide, as many as 5 million Americans are barred from voting by a variety of state laws that forbid convicted felons from voting for varying periods of time. Felons are kept from voting in every state but Maine and Vermont, though restrictions vary.

Mueller said this case would only affect Colorado voters.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review Florida’s lifetime ban on voting rights for convicted felons, another case that could have had national implications for millions of would-be voters. Florida attorneys argued that states have authority to set their own policies.

Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, a Democrat from Golden and a former county clerk, said if people have served their time, their voting rights should be reinstated.

“I think the ACLU is correct,” she said.

House Minority Leader Joe Stengel, R-Littleton, disagreed.

“The right to vote is not an absolute right. It is subject to some restrictions. Obviously, serving time in prison and on parole is a restriction,” Stengel said.

Court says Indian money accounting impossible

AP writer Jennifer Talhelm reports that “A federal appeals court decided Tuesday that it was unreasonable to require a detailed historical accounting of money the government has been managing for American Indians, saying the bookkeeping chore would “take 200 years.”" Here are some excerpts:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with the government and the American Indians in their effort to block a lower court’s order for the tally of money owed them.

The accounting had been ordered by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is overseeing a class-action lawsuit in which thousands of American Indians claim they were cheated out of more than $100 billion in oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties overseen by the Interior Department since 1887.

[…]

The issue of how to determine what is owed the American Indians has gone back and forth from Lamberth to the appeals court during the nearly 10 years since Blackfeet Indian Elouise Cobell filed the lawsuit.

An 1887 law allotted land to individual American Indians and provided that the government would hold the land and any revenue from it in trust for them and for their survivors. For 20 years before Cobell sued, several reports criticized the government’s management. In 1994, Congress ordered that the money be accounted for.

[…]

Lamberth has excoriated the government’s treatment of the plaintiffs in past decisions. This fall, he ordered the Interior Department to disconnect all computer systems with access to American Indian accounts. He said the department’s security was so bad, hackers could easily manipulate the data. The appeals court granted the department a reprieve so it could appeal.

Earlier this year, “the plaintiffs offered to settle the case for $27.5 billion” but lawmakers in the House and Senate said the amount was too high.

Katrina victims sue to force FEMA to provide timely aid

Yubanet.com reports that a class action has been filed to force FEMA to live up to its obligations:

A prominent New York law firm, a Washington-based civil rights legal organization, and a California not-for-profit legal organization, together with a Louisiana Law Professor today filed a class-action suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana to force the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide timely aid to victims of Hurricane Katrina living in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

The lawsuit, the first file against FEMA in relation to its response to Katrina, says that the agency has violated and continues to violate Federal law by failing to discharge its obligations as the federal agency chartered to care for victims of natural disasters.

[…]

The suit seeks a court order to require FEMA to make it easier for victims to apply for temporary housing assistance, to improve the agency’s outreach and accessibility and immediately to provide trailers or other alternatives to replace shelters, tents and other makeshift arrangements. The suit also asks the court to force FEMA to establish application guidelines under which victims can obtain continued financial assistance beyond a three-month period and receive adjustments based on family size and other factors. The plaintiffs also request that the court order FEMA to eliminate certain rules regarding the use of funds victims have already received and to cease a policy whereby FEMA makes room for its housing by evicting and destroying the homes of residents of trailer parks.

[…]

The legal action has been brought by 14 named plaintiffs on their own behalf and on the behalf of a class of people who lived in Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama on August 29, 2005 in areas that were subsequently declared Federal Disaster Areas, were displaced by Hurricane Katrina and have or will apply for disaster housing assistance under the Stafford Act.

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